What is an item in uploading photos to iCloud?

What is an item? (in uploading photos in the Photo application). It must be a photo or a video. I know that a long video can be hundreds or thousands of photos.

I've been uploading photos to iCloud for over four weeks now and it is still not finished. Started with 15,527 photos and 772 videos, total of 103.62 GBytes.

It is now slowing down. It references the number of "items" to be downloaded. It also references the GBytes loaded and a target number of GBytes to be uploaded.

Over an eight hour period last night, it only uploaded 30 items.

I am using a direct cable connect to the Internet. The lights on the switch and router are flashing, so there is network activity on the upload. But, I don't know what that activity is.

It now has 1724 items to download. It's been sitting on that number for several hours today.

Should I stop the process and restart Photo and resume the download?

Do I have some bad data?

This is getting really old!

Thanks

Vee